Linus Unleashes Linux Kernel 2.6.39

Faced with the decision to publish kernel 2.6.39 now or wait until after the upcoming LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds announces the immediate release of the new Linux kernel.

"So it's delayed a few days, and I really was struggling with the decision of whether I wanted to cut a final release at all: it could easily have made more sense to just do an -rc8," Torvalds writes in a Linux Kernel Mailing List post. "However, since I'm going to be at LinuxCon Japan in two weeks, the choice for me ended up whether I should just release, or drag it out *three* more weeks, or have some really messy merge window with a break in between."

Torvalds describes the current release window as "easy," and writes, "-rc2 was calm, -rc3 was _really_ calm, and -rc7 was tiny. And while this has more commits than -rc7 had, I didn't feel like that changed the overall picture much: we really did have much less churn after the merge window closed than we usually do. Which actually makes me pretty happy about the state of 2.6.39."